Tribute to Leiji Matsumoto, Legendary Manga and Anime Pioneer

Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist and animation creator, passed away in Japan on February 13, 2023, at the age of 85. He is arguably the most important figure in manga/anime in Japan after Osamu Tezuka, who was ten years older than him and emerged as a major manga artist after the war while Matsumoto was still a boy. (The two would eventually become friends.) Despite Tezuka’s towering achievements in both anime and manga, covered in a tribute here, I would contend that Matsumoto, who outlived Tezuka by 34 years, contributed the most trailblazing work in postwar Japanese animation history, when he co-created and designed the influential franchise, “Space Battleship Yamato” (1974), a saga of a space crew on an intergalactic mission against time to save a devastated Earth from alien invasion. When the initial TV season was compiled into a 135-minute theatrical feature and released in 1977, creating a bigger splash in Japan than STAR WARS, it enabled Matsumoto and the animators to create two subsequent TV seasons, in 1978 and 1980, and four more spin-off theatrical features, 1978-83. (Reboots and sequels followed decades later.)

Japanese Comics: Discovering Manga in the 1990s

American comic book publishers started releasing Japanese manga titles in English on a regular basis sometime in the late 1980s. Some of the earliest to appear were the following:

I first started reading manga in 1992, right after I’d acquired some anime VHS tapes in Japanese without subtitles. My earliest manga purchases were chosen so I could follow the anime adaptations without translation. In the process, I learned to appreciate manga for its own qualities.

The Passing of Two Manga Greats: Kazuo Koike and Monkey Punch

Earlier this month, two great manga creators died six days apart. Kazuhiko Kato died on April 11 at the age of 81 and Kazuo Koike died on April 17 at the age of 82. Both died of pneumonia. Kato was best known by his pseudonym, Monkey Punch, and was the creator, writer and artist of “Lupin III,” a long-running manga about a not-so-gentleman thief and his band of uniquely skilled sidekicks, that formed the basis for numerous animated TV series, movies and specials made from 1971 to 2018. Kazuo Koike was a writer responsible for some of my favorite manga series, including “Lone Wolf and Cub,” “Crying Freeman” and “Lady Snowblood.” These titles and others he wrote were made into live-action films, TV series and animated films. The two men were sometime rivals whose careers ran parallel to each other and they even collaborated once, as indicated in this paragraph from Anime News Network featuring Koike’s reaction after Kato’s death had been announced:

Osamu Tezuka at 90, “God of Manga”

Osamu Tezuka, known in Japan as manga no kamisama (God of manga), would have turned 90 on November 3, 2018. The creator of thousands of volumes of manga (Japanese comic books) from the postwar years to his death, he’s best known in the U.S. for several animated series based on his works, including “Astro Boy,” “Kimba, the White Lion,” and “Princess Knight,” in all of which he had considerable input. The very first Japanese animated feature I saw was one of his, PHOENIX 2772 (1980), which played at a film festival in New York in the summer of 1982. It was, in fact, the first work of Japanese animation I ever wrote about. Since then, I’ve seen hundreds of films and TV episodes based on Tezuka’s works, many produced by him, and have read dozens of volumes of his manga that have been translated into English.